The World Isn’t Flat, It’s a Pyramid! [Ponzi Scheme]
#Platform #Subscription #Scams
The “pyramid scheme,” also known as multi-level marketing or just network marketing, is a business model employed by subscription-based social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, where people “grow” from recruiting other people.
Those “other people” have no relationship value to the marketer other than providing the figurative “zeros” that enlarge his ego and his pool of potential customers. Euphemistically, they are called “subscribers,” “followers,” or “patrons.”
Substack, the American online publishing platform, operates on such a pyramid scheme. Dr. Pattberg is not the first to recognize this. The author of The Menticide Manual and The Human Farm created a Substack account two years ago, posting weekly, yet received zero views from Substack’s existing (self-reported) 50 million users. Meanwhile, his own imported readership was constantly spammed with content from top creators. “They’re harnessing off my subscribers to boost their own sales, while I get nothing from their 50 million existing readers—whose attention, I assume, has already been divided and consumed.” “Substack,” the Doctor explains, “is not a leveled plain field or "platform," it is a pyramid Ponzi scheme.”
A “Ponzi scheme,” named after investment scammer Charles Ponzi, promises high returns from a growing business to new investors not knowing that they are that growing business!
Substack needs you to go out and talk to people, seduce them, pretend to care. Eventually, they, too, want to be as popular as you are. They also want to register with Substack. Now they must immediately recruit their own subscribers or else will look like failures. How do they recruit if they are not professional marketing companies with a million dollars campaign budget?
Get creative! Recruit your mother, your sister, your Facebook friends, your ex, many exes, your coworkers, or even the strangers at the mall. Talk to people on the street. At the gym. By the pool. At your daughter ‘s birthday party, which of course you set up as your own selfish Substack promotional gig. Get them interested. Just do it! And if you haven’t succeeded just yet, “fake it till you make it.” Create fake accounts and pay yourself as “Subscriber Susie from Moneylaundry Ranch.” Buy subscribers—everybody does. People subscribe to people who already have lots of subscriptions.
The people at the top of the pyramid get extremely rich by selling their products “down the line” to millions, while the people at the bottom struggle to recruit new investors below them to exploit.
Without constant recruitment, however, a pyramid scheme collapses. The first signs of stagnation are increasingly aggressive recruiting methods, including begging, insults, and desperate cries for help. Another glaring warning sign is the stark disparity between the top and bottom of the pyramid: top marketers gloat about their business sense, post what they’ve had for breakfast, publish the 10th list of what you must do to become successful with women, and get millions of impressions and a couple of hundred paid subscriptions effortlessly, while a young English teacher who spent eight years writing his life’s novel gets just 5 views, or a former pop musician sharing new lyrics for the first time receives a mere 2 likes.
“Well, then try harder! Maybe you need to buy my $9.90 content creator course! Loser!”
Instead of reporting the pyramid scam to the authorities, the victims are too ashamed of their own stupidity and embarrassingly low subscriber count. Some are calling it emotional abuse. Treating people like this should be considered a crime or human rights violation.
The founding scammers marketers, eventually, migrate to the next social media pyramid program, urging top-tier followers to join them elsewhere. Medium, Quora, YouTube, Etsy, Patreon, Telegram, Truth Social, Ghost, Telegram, and Tiktok are all examples of multi-level marketing platforms. None of these, including Substack, will be around another decade.
They’ll let the scheme collapse, rebrand, relaunch under a new name, or start another brand-new subscription scam.
And all YOU gotta do to get a potential 1000 subscribers this time is to join NOW.
Beware: The Substack publishing platform is a scam. It‘s not the writers‘ fault though; they are being led on and taken advantage of by a predatory, subscription-based Pyramid Ponzi scheme. If this text won‘t open your eyes to the abuse, nothing will. https://thorstenjpattberg.substack.com/p/the-world-is-a-pyramid-ponzi-scheme
Thank's Thorsten. I saw through Substack's Business Modell after a few comments i left on some of their threads. Shortly after i got a substack message "You read 150000 words in the past 2 month", now write something. It's not only the Ponzi Scheme you mention but also the fact that it's a obvious PROFILING Site, pretty much like all the other US based social media sites. As far as Telegram is concerned i'm still in sort of a learning process and hope that it's different. The fact that this is apart from TikTok the only non US Based site gives me some hope. We'll see.